Silly hobbit. Adventures are for dwarves!

What I liked about The Hobbit:

The Howard Shore score was once again excellent. It establishes a new theme song for the dwarves and uses it in dwarf-centric scenes. For example, there's an upbeat variation when the dwarves are all fighting together. And much of the old music is back as well. The ring theme plays in a foreboding moment when the ring is first used.

And the New Zealand landscapes are once again a sight to behold, and they are used very well.

What I didn't like about The Hobbit:

Before seeing the movie, I noticed a lot of people defending the choice to stretch it out into three movies because "there's just so much content." If that's true, then why isn't The Lord of the Rings 9 movies? Or 18 movies, seeing as it's actually 6 books and one book apparently contains 3 movies worth of content? Surely The Lord of the Rings was done a great disservice by squishing it into a pitiful 12 hours of screen time, right? And yet, people who say The Hobbit should be 3 movies seem perfectly happy with only 3 movies for Lord of the Rings. It seems these people are terribly bad at math or have a short memory span or lack the fundamental ability to make mental connections between two different things.

I predicted that the movie would be needlessly elongated and I was right. New conflicts and characters were introduced to pad the story. Is this a bad thing? Well at least the new characters are drawn from the established lore of Middle Earth rather than being invented completely.

I'm a huge fan of Peter Jackson but he's certainly not without fault. One of his flaws is that he's pretty sloppy when it comes to continuity. An awful lot of time is spent on closeups so that you can't get a good view of the surroundings and you can't tell if things have been moved around or removed or added or changed. Of course this isn't a huge deal but it gets pretty ridiculous when every single character's horse magically disappears like before the final battle in Return of the King.

There seems to be a heavier reliance on CG characters in The Hobbit than there was in Lord of the Rings (which admittedly revolutionized CG characters with Gollum). I wish there were more cool prosthetics in The Hobbit. We get to see cool CG characters in plenty of movies.

The Lord of the Rings obviously deserved to be a trilogy. It was grander in scale and the stakes were higher than The Hobbit. I thought that The Hobbit should be one movie before I saw it and I still think so afterwards. Let's see if I can design such a movie, sticking with the 170 minute run-time. 20 minutes in The Shire + 10 minutes with the trolls + 10 minutes in Rivendell + 15 minutes in The Misty Mountains + 15 minutes with Bilbo and Gollum + 10 minutes with Beorn + 20 minutes in Mirkwood + 15 minutes in Laketown + 25 minutes at the Lonely Mountain + 10 minutes for the final battle + 5 minutes of epilogue + 15 minutes of credits = 170 minutes. Yes, it's not as drawn out as we all would like but neither is Lord of the Rings. And it can be drawn out more in an extended version. I wish I could say that Jackson is making a legitimate artistic choice by drawing it out like this but it seems to me to be chiefly a way to milk the franchise for money.

You're mine, assassin!

I love Assassin's Creed. The first game was groundbreaking and revolutionary. I had actually seen a behind-the-scenes preview of Assassin's Creed in a DVD handout from GameStop that showcased upcoming releases from Ubisoft, and I was skeptical. I figured the game couldn't possibly be as good as they were saying it was. I expected something disappointingly linear, perhaps like a Prince of Persia game (though at the time I hadn't even played any games from that series). I couldn't have been more wrong.

Assassin's Creed brought a level of freedom that I couldn't even have imagined. I am of course referring to your ability to freerun in a vast open world, climbing virtually any wall in large ancient cites, leaping from roof to roof. Freerunning in games had previously been confined to limited obstacle courses. But in Assassin's Creed, you are the king of the world. Just running around using the game's movement system is so fun I sometimes felt like the game didn't need anything else. It could have been released as just a giant sandbox game and I still would have liked it.

The exotic setting of the game gives it even more appeal. The world of 800 years ago is brought to life so believably, and the experience is perhaps made more palpable by having the main character be an observer from the future. You feel like you've been plopped into this ancient world because that is what has happened to the character. Your first leap of faith marks the start of a game that you know is going to be incredible. Your first viewpoint reveals a beautifully rendered landscape that makes you wonder how you hadn't noticed it before. When I approached Damascus, the game's first main city, on a horse, and I saw the spectacular walled city down below from my vantage point on a cliff, and the horse turned sideways in the foreground and reared up into the air, I was so moved and thought this must be one of the great moments in gaming history. I loved the first game so much that after I beat it I scoured the Internet for clues about any secrets I might have missed. And I was somewhat peeved about how they put a cliffhanger at the end of the very first game, since I imagined if the game wasn't successful they might not make sequels.

And after the first game, I couldn't believe it but the series got better. Assassin's Creed 2 seemed to fix every minor complaint a person could have about the first one. I was so excited when I discovered my character could swim that I called my brother into the room to see. And the introduction of money was also sure to satisfy a lot of people. I got goosebumps when the title finally showed up as the music crescendoed, shown alongside your soon-to-be assassin perched atop a building in Renaissance Italy. The only problems in that game were that you could no longer leave the animus or revisit old memories, but the next game, Brotherhood, fixed both of those.

The whole series is not only revolutionary because of the gameplay but also because of its ability to inspire people towards revolution. Much like the movie V for Vendetta created a symbol for fighting against oppressive government power, Assassin's Creed has created new role models for young people everywhere.  People can think of the assassins when they think about bringing corporate and political villains to justice. The upcoming Assassin's Creed 3 is even set during a very literal revolution.

But I have to say the most recent game, Revelations, is my least favorite of the series. The game excludes one of my favorite parts of the previous two games, the puzzle sequences you encounter when you find a hidden symbol with your eagle vision. The tower defense minigame and the first person minigame seem lackluster and out of place. I suppose the hook blade is cool, and the bomb system and double weapon wheel system aren't bad but I don't think I would say they make the series any better. The art style for the characters looks radically different from the previous games, and worse in my opinion. And the coding is so sloppy that at one point I encountered a fatal glitch that prevented me from either completing my memory or leaving it so I had to start the whole game over again from scratch. I noticed the game was made by six different Ubisoft studios, so maybe that has something to do with it. I was happy to hear we'd get to revisit Altair, but nothing special was really done with that. We didn't even get to see Malik, my favorite character from the first game.

My favorite part of Revelations is the first sequence, when Ezio visits Masyaf and you get to see what the place looks like after three centuries. The intro cinematic is breathtaking. And the sequence creates an atmosphere of hopelessness, like this once invincible assassin has grown so old that he will surely meet his doom. It's welcome after playing the other games where your athletic prowess seems to have no limit. Leandros is the best villain in the game but he dies in the first sequence. He has more character than any of the other villains, so hellbent on discovering the assassins' secrets. One of your assassination targets turns out to be a good guy, and you don't even get to kill the main villain.

I think the biggest problem with the nearly perfect series is the lack of challenge. You are powerful enough to fight everyone else in the world at the same time and win. The game has to artificially make you lose when you get detected in certain missions because otherwise it would be too easy since you could certainly fight off all the guards and you have nothing to worry about. This is exemplified in Assassin's Creed 2 when you see that instead of giving the usual villainous speeches about how they're sure to win, the templars all cower in fear at the thought of this assassin who is easily wiping them out one by one. This is perhaps why I think Cesare is the greatest villain of the whole series. He's so full of character and so full of himself.

My idea is to have the templars fuse one of their greatest warriors with a Piece of Eden somehow, so that he'd be more powerful than you are. I think the games would be better if you had something to be afraid of instead of the ability to kill everyone everywhere and not worry about anything. When you see the super templar you'd have to run, like a real assassin. It seems to me like assassins should have to choose their battles wisely instead of winning through brute force. The way the games are now you're more of a super soldier than an assassin.

Though the enemies in the Assassin's Creed games die so easily, one thing sets them apart from the enemies in other games for me. Sometimes when a guard sees you he'll get so excited that he'll yell, "You're mine, assassin!" But the last part often gets drowned out, perhaps because of the noise of battle, perhaps because he dies before he can finish. So it ends up just sounding like, "You're mine," screamed with all the intense passion a guard could muster. It's like his entire life has been building up to this moment. It's like he's thinking, they all told me I'd never amount to anything. Today's the day I prove them all wrong. I am going to kill Ezio Auditore.

Are platformers easy to make?

Beginning game developers should naturally start out by making games that are easy to make, before moving on to the hard stuff. Unfortunately, this doesn't work out so well for the impatient. People often get into game development because of specific game ideas they have, and these ideas are usually extravagant. Developers don't want to have to wait and gain skill before tackling the games they really want to make, so sometimes they bite off more than they can chew by trying to make a very large game as their very first one. This generally leads to failure along with a shelved project that's barely even started, and can perhaps even lead to the developer giving up on game development entirely. Thus it is very important to start small and simple.

There is an incredibly widespread mistaken notion that platformers are a type of game that is easy to make. This is perhaps because of the large amount of platformers for the Nintendo Entertainment System, an early console that undoubtedly changed the world. Because of the limited capabilities of the NES, it is assumed that the inner workings of its games had to be simple in order to function. This is true to an extent. But it can be said that the creators of those games were geniuses who were able to do a lot with a little. They pushed the NES to its very limits with every game. It almost seems like they didn't make platformers because they were easy, but because they were difficult. Platformers were the most complicated type of game that the NES could handle, and they were made in spite of the system's limitations, not because of them.

Platformers are complicated because of a variety of things like hit testing and collision resolution in a very large environment, as well as the necessity for inventive level design. Typical NES platformers also incorporated a range of unique enemies with unique behaviors. Beginning game developers generally don't even know where to start when tackling these problems that they never anticipated because of the illusion that platformers are easy to make. Non-programmers are even more likely to be mistaken about which types of games are hard to make and which are easy.

I would say the most difficult type of game to make would be classic real-time strategy games. When I say classic, I mean games like Warcraft and Age of Empires, not things like tower defense games which technically might be considered RTS's. I think the most difficult part of game programming is artificial intelligence, and classic RTS's have to incorporate lots of it on a grand scale, as well as things like path-finding. Platformers seem easy in comparison, yes, but there are a great many types of games that platformers are much harder than. Arcade games, puzzle games, arcade puzzle games, RPG's, shooters, and point-and-click adventures are all examples of game genres that are easier to make than platformers. If a person is looking for an easy type of game to make, I suggest one of those.